The Secrets We Kept(89)
Wherever I was, she was never far from my mind. I kept waiting for the day when I’d wake up and my first thought wouldn’t be of her. The worst was when I dreamed of her. How one moment we were together, only to wake and feel the loss all over again. Sometimes I’d feel a spark run across my body, convinced Irina must’ve been thinking of me at that exact moment. Silly.
On her birthday, I wanted to call—even just to hear her answer—but didn’t. Instead, I opened the nightstand drawer, removed the book, and, for the first time, began to read.
On they went, singing “Rest Eternal,” and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.
His words grabbed hold of my wrist. I knew the way a feeling can linger after a song ends. I shut the book and went out onto my balcony, which was only big enough for a single chair. I sat and opened the book again.
When I read the part where Yuri reunites with Lara, in the battlefield hospital, and realized that this book—this novel they deemed a weapon—was really a love story, I wanted to close it once more. But I didn’t. I read until the sun had faded into a purple halo over the tops of the buildings. I read until the streetlights turned on and I had to squint to make out the sentences. When it became too dark, I went back inside. Wrapping myself in my robe, I lay down and continued to read—until I fell asleep, my hand an accidental bookmark.
When I awoke, it was nearly midnight and I was hungry. I dressed and put the book into my purse.
As I crossed the hotel lobby, I saw the woman from the bookshop seated on a chaise longue, beneath a portrait of Flaubert. Impeccably dressed in Chanel tweed, her hair was still perfectly finger-waved, albeit two shades lighter than it was when she told me about Henry. When she saw me, she got up without making eye contact and left.
We walked for what must have been twenty minutes, the woman never looking back. Eventually, we came to a stop at the Café de Flore, on the boulevard Saint-Germain. The café’s awning dripped with white Christmas lights. Its terrace was empty, and its snow-laden wicker chairs looked as if they were wearing white fur coats. A torn red, white, and blue Vive de Gaulle banner hung from the wrought iron balcony on the second floor.
Inside, the woman kissed both my cheeks again and left, but not before pointing to a table in the back, where a man I recognized was waiting.
I knew they’d come, but I wasn’t expecting it to be him.
He stood to greet me, the too-small tortoiseshell glasses he’d worn to Feltrinelli’s party gone. “Ciao, bella,” he said, his Italian accent also gone, replaced with a Russian one. He reached for my hand and kissed it. “Pleasure seeing you again. I suppose you’ve come to have your dresses cleaned?”
“Possibly.”
We sat and he handed me a menu. “Order whatever you’d like.” He raised a finger. “One cannot subsist on pain au chocolat alone.” He already had an open bottle of white wine and a silver tray of untouched snails in front of him, so I ordered a croque monsieur from the crisp-collared waiter and waited for him to speak.
He drank the last of the wine and signaled the waiter for another bottle. “I prefer women to men and wine to both,” he joked. Communist or capitalist, men are still men. “We wanted to thank you in person,” he continued. “For your generosity.”
“Did you find it useful?”
“Oh, yes. A talker, that one. Very…how do you say…”
“Social?”
“Yes! Exactly. Social.”
I didn’t ask for details about what happened to Henry Rennet, and I didn’t want to know. For a year, I’d wanted revenge more than I’d ever wanted anything. And after he’d gotten me fired, I not only wanted to destroy him, I wanted to burn the whole thing to the ground. But I felt only a minor relief at the confirmation of Henry’s fate. Anger is a poor replacement for sadness; like cotton candy, the sweetness of revenge disintegrates immediately. And now that it was gone, what did I have left to keep me going?
The waiter returned with my food, and as my new friend ate his snails, he laid it all out for me in as few words as possible.
“How long will you be in Paris?” he asked.
“I have no return ticket.”
He dipped a snail into a dish of melted butter. “Good! You should do some traveling. See the world. There’s so much a woman like you can do. The world is yours for the taking.”
“Hard to take it with limited funds, though.”
“Ah.” He slurped down a snail and pointed his two-pronged fork at me. “But I can tell you are a resourceful woman. And one who deserves whatever she asks for.”
“I’m not sure that’s the case anymore.”
“I assure you it is. You undervalue yourself. Maybe less perceptive men can’t see it, but I can. As Emerson said, one must be an opener of doors.”
Since arriving in Paris, I’d walked past the big black doors within the high cement wall enclosing the H?tel d’Estrées several times. Each time, I’d look up and see the red flag with its gold hammer and sickle and wonder: What would it be like to walk in as one person and out as another? Here was my invitation to find out.
I thought of Henry Rennet dancing me through the restaurant lobby, then opening the coatroom door behind me. I thought of Anderson passing by, after, without a word—then seated at his big mahogany desk telling me I was no longer a desirable asset and how he hated to say it but I’d become too much of a risk to keep on. I thought of Frank passing me in the hallway as I left HQ for the last time without so much as a handshake.